DADE CITY: PUT PRAYER IN SCHOOLS

City commissioners in Sweetwater, a community of about 15,000 people in southwest Dade County, feel strongly about prayer in public schools.

So strongly that on Monday, the seven-member Sweetwater commission unanimously passed a resolution urging the Dade County School Board and the state and federal government to make prayer as much a part of the curriculum as reading, writing and arithmetic.

"A child's religious beliefs should not be left at the door of the schools that the child will spend the next 12 years attending," the resolution says.

On Tuesday, Council President Cecilia Holtz Alonso, who introduced the measure, suggested that if prayers become an integral part of the school day, students who refuse to pray should be "counseled."

"I don't want to impose anything on any child, but they would benefit from counseling to learn the power of prayer," Holtz Alonso said. "When I went to school, we prayed, and I think everyone behaved better," she said.

Civil libertarians reacted more strongly to Holtz Alonso's comments than to the actual words of the resolution.

"The resolution itself is not a problem, but the comment that children be counseled is troublesome," said Robyn Blumner, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

The U.S. Supreme Court has found mandatory prayer in schools violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

In Florida, however, schools are allowed to offer up to two minutes of silence during which students who wish to pray can do so. Students also may pray as long as it's not part of formal classroom activity, said Brewser Brown, communications director for the Florida Department of Education.

Henry Fraind, a spokesman for the Dade schools, said the board received Sweetwater's resolution but would not act on it.

"If children want to pray, they can do so during the moment of silence," Fraind said. "If they don't want to, they don't have to, and that's the law."

Though Dade schools are not likely to discuss school prayer any time soon, teachers will begin teaching ethics, values and leadership this fall. The so-called "character building" classes will be offered at most grade levels.

Sweetwater Mayor Gloria Bango said the commission's vote represents the views of her city's residents. Sweetwater is 95 percent Hispanic and Catholic.

Bango said the Sweetwater commission wants to be part of a growing movement across the country in which elected officials, including President Clinton, are taking a stand on the issue.

"I really believe that the vast majority of people in the United States want prayer in schools," she said. "My city wanted to express its point of view."